"It really does immerse you immediately into what's going on here and gives you a real sense of how to break into the industry," said Jeff Bibeau, an Ithaca College senior enrolled in that school's L.A. semester. "It would be silly of me to study four years of communications in upstate New York, cut off from the rest of the world."
A television and radio studies major from Massachusetts, Bibeau is juggling internships with the "Brothers and Sisters" television series and at a movie production house. He does clerical work, fetches coffee, reads scripts and offers opinions in story meetings.
Bibeau enjoyed a sophomore semester in London but said his Los Angeles jobs and classes on film criticism and media law seem "much more relevant." He intends to finish at Ithaca in the spring and may job hunt in Los Angeles.
L.A. semesters, which typically cost about the same as a term at the home campus, aside from transportation extras, help students make informed decisions about their futures, explained Stephen Tropiano, director of Ithaca's program, which started in 1994. "For some, it affirms what they are interested in. For some, they realize it's not what they want to do," he said.
The only other U.S. city with so many out-of-town college programs is Washington, D.C., where political science and government are emphasized.
The rise of the L.A. semesters can be partly attributed to students' becoming more vocationally oriented, said Peter Bukalski, an official with the University Film and Video Assn., a national faculty group. Yet Bukalski, a film professor at Southern Illinois University, sounded a cautionary note about raising false career hopes. "It's a very, very competitive business," he said.
Administrators say the "domestic abroad" programs here are not recruiting rivals because they mainly enroll students from their own colleges. But they say they need a Los Angeles presence to counter the hometown advantage of cinema graduates at, for example, USC and UCLA.
"We are saying our students are just as good as yours, if not better, and we are going to compete head to head with you," said Philip Nemy, executive director of the 3-year-old University of Texas at Austin program in Los Angeles.
Classes for most of the programs are held in rented offices in the Burbank and mid-Wilshire areas. Columbia College leases space at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood for the 200 students it trains each year.
